To investigate the full range of phenomena which occur in open
systems, one needs a model of the dissipative processes (such as
scattering of electrons by phonons in semiconductors) which occur
within the system. However, the question of the correct description of
such processes is at present far from resolved (see Jauho, 1989).
Therefore, in the inductive spirit of the present work, we will assume
a priori that the classical Boltzmann collision operator acting
upon the Wigner distribution is an adequate approximation at some
level. The form which the Boltzmann operator takes within the present
one-dimensional model is developed below.

In solid-state physics the name ``Boltzmann equation'' is applied
to any transport equation which combines the Liouville description of
ballistic motion with a local Markovian model of
the stochastic processes. This can
include such processes as the scattering of electrons by phonons or
impurities. These will be considered to be one-body processes because
the phonon and impurity degrees of freedom are not explicitly included
in the model, and thus (neglecting Fermi degeneracy) such processes lead
to terms linear in the distribution function. The Boltzmann equation
can also include a master-operator description of two-body interactions
such as electron-electron scattering (and in statistical physics the
name ``Boltzmann equation'' usually refers more specifically to this
kinetic equation), and such a term will be
nonlinear in the single-particle distribution function (assuming the
Stosszahlansatz). For the present purposes we will only consider
one-body interactions so that the collision operator is linear.

The Boltzmann collision term is usually written in the form (Ferry,
1980):

where is the rate of scattering from plane-wave state to
state k. (To maintain consistency with the literature we will use the
wavevector to label these states, rather than the momentum.) Equation
(14.157) can be rewritten to emphasize the linear, homogeneous
nature of the collision term:

Note that the collision term is local, so that in the complete kernel
of there is a -function in q, which is suppressed
from the above definition. Note that the potential superoperator
has a similar dependence on q (4.39), and as a result
and have the same sparsity structure in the discrete
approximation [see (4.55)]. Thus, the addition of
to the calculation requires no modification to the
superoperator data structures or solution procedures.

The scattering rates are taken to be the Fermi golden rule
rates.
For electron-phonon scattering:

where is the Hamiltonian for the electron-phonon interaction
and is the phonon frequency. In (14.159) and the
following, the upper sign refers to phonon absorption and the lower sign
refers to phonon emission. The transition rates depend upon the full
three-dimensional of each state, whereas the numerical calculations
at present consider only the longitudinal momentum . Thus, the
scattering rates must be ``projected'' onto the one-dimensional model.
To do so, we first assume that the distribution of electrons with
respect to the transverse momenta of the initial state
is a normalized Maxwellian distribution at a fixed temperature:

where

with defined in (3.18).
The resulting scattering rates are then integrated over the transverse
momenta of the final states:

where is the volume of the crystal. Henceforth we will drop
the subscript from the .

For polar optical phonon scattering the absolute square of the matrix
element is (in SI notation and from Fawcett, Boardman, and Swain, 1970):

where is the longitudinal-optical phonon frequency, and
and are the low and high frequency
permittivities of the semiconductor, respectively. The phonon
occupation number is given by the Bose-Einstein distribution.
The one-dimensional scattering rates are obtained by inserting
(14.163) into (14.162). After some manipulation, one
can write an expression for the scattering rate. First, define
dimensionless quantities a and b as:

Then the scattering rate is

The collision operator for polar optical phonon scattering in the
one-dimensional model is then obtained by inserting (14.164), for both
phonon emission and absorption, into a
discretized version of (14.158).

The collision operator for acoustic deformation-potential scattering
may be similarly constructed. Assuming equipartition of energy in the
acoustic modes, the matrix element is (Fawcett, Boardman, and Swain, 1970):

where is the acoustic deformation potential, is the
mass density of the material, and s is the velocity of sound. The
second expression is obtained by expanding the Bose distribution for low
energies using . Inserting
(14.165) into (14.162) and multiplying by 2 to include
the equal emission and absorption rates, we obtain:

Given the expressions such as (14.164) and (14.166) we can
readily construct the collision operator using (14.158).
For the purposes of numerical
evaluation, it is most convenient to accumulate the values of (in the discrete approximation) by performing the assignments

for all values of k and . One can implement this procedure in a
single subprogram to which a function which evaluates is
passed as an argument, and then invoke this subprogram for each of the
processes of interest. A convenient test of the resulting is
provided by the principle of detailed balance. It is ,
where is an equilibrium (Maxwellian) distribution. The
collision operators obtained from (14.164) and (14.166) pass
this test.

The effects of the Boltzmann collision operators for these phonon
scattering processes on the steady-state
characteristics of the RTD are illustrated in Fig. 25.
In this calculation the matrix elements for GaAs using the parameters
of Fawcett, Boardmann, and Swain (1970) were assumed to hold throughout
the structure.
The acoustic phonon scattering has a very small effect on the
curve. The LO phonon scattering processes significantly decrease the
peak current and increase the valley current. The initial report of
this calculation (Frensley, 1988b) employed a scattering operator for
the LO phonons which was one-half of the correct value, due to an
algebraic error.
Similar calculations have been done by Mains and Haddad (1988b).
Kluksdahl et al. (1989) and Jensen and Buot (1990) have used a
relaxation term to model the inelastic processes.

Figure 25. Effect of phonon scattering processes on the
characteristic of the resonant-tunneling diode, using the
Boltzmann collision operator. Scattering by LO phonons significantly
reduces the peak current and increases the valley current. The effect
of acoustic phonons is nearly negligible. The temperature was 300 K.